| Director: |
Paul Van Ness, MD |
| Faculty: |
Mark A. Agostini, MD |
| |
Ramon Diaz-Arrastia, MD., PhD |
The UTSW Epilepsy program offers comprehensive clinical epilepsy services for patients of any age. The epilepsy program, established in 1984, has four epileptologists. There are also three neurosurgeons. The epilepsy team also consists of epilepsy case managers, research nurses, electroneurodiagnostic technologists, neuroradiologists, neurophysiologists, and social workers. Comprehensive psychosocial evaluation and other supportive services are also provided for patients. The program provides state of the art clinical neurophysiology including: adult, pediatric and neonatal electroencephalography; digital video-EEG monitoring to characterize seizures; invasive EEG recordings to localize seizure foci for epilepsy surgery; intraoperative electrocorticography; intraoperative and extraoperative cortical functional mapping; Wada testing for language lateralization; MR Spectroscopy; functional MRI. MRI volumetric studies and single photon computer tomography (SPECT) are available to help evaluate surgical candidates. Because of the comprehensive services offered, we are a fourth level epilepsy center by the National Association of Epilepsy Centers guidelines and we serve as a regional, national, and international referral facility.
Facilities include an 11-bed state of the art epilepsy monitoring unit at Parkland Memorial Hospital, a 3-bed monitoring unit at Children's Medical Center of Dallas, and a 2-bed monitoring unit at Texas Scottish Rite Hospital. Both the Parkland and Children's neurophysiology laboratories are accredited by the Laboratory Accreditation Board of the American EEG Society.
Outpatient epilepsy clinics are at the James W. Aston Ambulatory Care Center, Children's Medical Center of Dallas, and Parkland Memorial Hospital and include Drug Study Clinics for patients interested in trying a new but investigational drug for epilepsy.
The UTSW Epilepsy program also offers one to two years of epilepsy and EEG fellowship training for qualified neurologists.
